Ral Veroni
The artwork on the bills, for lack of a better name, could be called "A Struggle for Life." At the time when I started (early '94) I was designing a "Macabre Dance," a series of graffiti of skeletons done in stencils which I would put on water tanks in my friend's dormitories. The most famous macabre dances wehre those by Holbein, Guadalupe Posada and Alfred Rethel. All of them, in spite of their differences, still have some commonalities: they all made prints which contained irony and a moral principle. I made my series of bills under the influence of this genre: whilst the typical images (such as skeletons and scythes) are no longer present a certain connection between these old engravings and my work still remains.
There are very heavy bills whose image conveys a spark which goes well beyond the design or the alue which it represents or represented. A currency bill from Falklands, one from Germany from the 20s or 40s, our one million pesso bill from the time of the dictatorship or any other from that time carry in them a more evident proof of memories, pain and history. It is more difficult to draw on these bills, which "speak" for themselves better than any drawing a little head or a little sketch on one side of a bill is sufficient to transmit a message which only they sent with plenty of crudity.
NN Made in Argentina / Night and fog Made and Argentina
I created this work first of all because I enjoy drawing but sometimes I think that I would have accomplished the same objective - conceptually speaking - simply recirculating the old, wasted, sweaty bills, among the brand new ones which now provoke sleepless nights and distress.
Urban being asks himself about money in the same manner primitive being used to ask himself about lightening, rain, or lions; inexplicable things for him but without a doubt these were intimately related to divinity. Even though we all march to its rhythm, money and the grief its absence brings to us is something incomprehensible, far from the divine and only related to God when the person who wins the lottery feels blessed.